Friday, August 3, 2012

As best understood - one of last millennium"s Cold War abiding fears was some kinda balloon would go up betwixt Collectivist Union"s Warsaw Pact and Great Satan"s NATOlicious allies spaking a totally heckish new clear war. Pop pop couture was chock full of that kinda thinking hooked up with bunches of sound tracks.

Might we again be drifting toward some new form of mortal national combat? Or, will our future more likely ape the near-half-century that defined the Cold War—a period in which tensions between competing states ebbed and flowed but peace mostly prevailed by dint of nuclear mutual fear and loathing?

The short answer is, nobody knows.

This much, however, is clear: The strategic military competitions of the next 2 decades will be unlike any the world has yet seen. Assuming U.S., Chinese, Russian, Israeli, Indian, French, British, and Pakistani strategic forces continue to be modernized and America and Russia continue to reduce their strategic nuclear deployments, the next arms race will be run by a much larger number of contestants—with highly destructive strategic capabilities far more closely matched and capable of being quickly enlarged than in any other previous period in history.

Tripping through hard numbers on the number of new clear weaponry hanging out for now - right now -

Great Satan has no more than 1,980 deployed nuclear weapons, and Russia has between 4,537 and 6,537.3 India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom (UK), France, and Little Satan have 1 to 400 each, and China may have anywhere from between 200 to more than 1,000.4 Putting aside North Korea’s nascent nuclear force (cf. France’s force of 1961), the difference in the numbers of nuclear deployments between the top and bottom nuclear powers, then, has fallen at least two full orders of magnitude and is projected to decline even further.

Near future may see 17 new clear power nation states and that means oh, about 136 chances for strategic miscalculation!

An increasingly fashionable rejoinder to such broodings is to maintain an optimistic brand of nuclear realism. Any intelligent state, it can be argued, knows that using nuclear weapons is militarily self-defeating and that these weapons’ only legitimate mission is to deter military threats. Fretting about nuclear use and nuclear proliferation (vertical or horizontal), as such, is mistaken or overwrought.10But is it? Can states deter military threats with nuclear weapons if their actual use is self-defeating? Which states, if any, actually believe they are militarily useless?

The Russians and Pakistanis clearly do not. Just the opposite: They have gone out of their way to develop battlefield nuclear weapons and plan to use them first to defeat opposing advanced conventional forces. As for the United States, France, and the UK, all have studiously and repeatedly refused to renounce first use. Israel, meanwhile, insists that while it will not be first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East, it also will not be second. This leaves North Korea—a wild card—and India and China, whose declared no first-use policies are anything but clear-cut policy propositions.Intelligence agencies have determined that Russia invested over $6 billion to expand a 400 square mile underground nuclear complex at Yamantau a full decade after the Berlin Wall fell.

American intelligence officials have also determined that this complex is burrowed deep enough to withstand a nuclear attack, and is large enough and provisioned sufficiently to house 60,000 people for months . They believe it is one of a system of as many as 200 Russian nuclear bunkers.13 It is unclear why Russia has upgraded these Cold War underground centers.

China and NoKo have got some major tunnel and hardened hidey holes for their new clear chiz - China"s especially appears to be designed and provisioned to house thousands of military staff during a protracted New Clear exchange

Also makes the point that one cat's 'plausible deniability may not be the same as another cat's def of plausible deniablity with or without non state actor outers

The Next Arms Race is fully crunk including sup delish bits about Land of the Pure, China, India and a host near future new clear naughtiness like Nippon, Persia, Taiwan and Whahabbi Arabia for starters

wHoA!

h0t!

~hEy Y"all! DoN"t MiSs GsGf~!

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